


translations and transatlantic flights

by hooksandheroics



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Avengers: Endgame spoilers, Clintasha AU, F/M, some kind of Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 02:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18791596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/pseuds/hooksandheroics
Summary: There are only a few things in this world that defy the laws of the universe.





	translations and transatlantic flights

**Author's Note:**

> (endgame spoilers, if you haven't seen it yet. beware.)
> 
> i have to. it doesn't have character death in it, so. also, this is a little bit all over the place and incoherent and i might have injected a headcanon or two that a friend suggested. thanks, friend, you know who you are.

Scott disappears on a Friday night, six months after the snap.

But first, he appears at the Avengers Facility three days after the snap.

Three days after the snap, the world was in disarray. Governments were in shutdown, there were major power outages, and the remaining half of the population were confused and afraid, but more importantly: angry. There were questions – questions that direly demanded answers, answers that could not be given as global efforts were focused solely on getting the world back on track. Or as _on track_ as it could get with half of its population misted.

Tessa found Scott at the front door of the facility, angry.

He smelled of stale beer and no sleep, deep dark bags under his bloodshot eyes, and had a severe looking wound around his left ankle.

His whole being was shaking, save for the hand that’s holding his bow. Always the hand that held his bow. Tessa used to find comfort in holding that hand through all the shit that they went through – but now, with the light dying in his eyes, she felt like running far and away from this man.

A split second and a breath later –

Scott’s eyes filled with tears and the tension in shoulders seeped out with one quiet, broken sob:

“My brothers – gone.”

*

Tessa and Scott start sleeping together a month after.

Her ribs are still sore and there’s a slight chance that her kneecap will never heal, and Scott keeps picking at the scabs of his ankle like a fidgety child. The facility is ghostly empty save for the occasional fly-in by the other surviving members. All of them with families to find and list for missing.

For Tessa, she has no one. Well, no one that she knew of. She had acquaintances outside SHIELD, outside the Avengers, but her family is here and just like that, they’re gone.

She confesses this tiny little thing to him one Monday night, donning beers and reheated pizza in front of the huge TV screen and for once, they don’t have to fight anyone about watching too much romcoms. She says, “I don’t know what’s left of me anymore.”

Which is ironic. She was never whole, just as he was never whole. There was a semblance of it before with him. In Budapest, in Beijing, in Scotland – it seems that they speak in languages that only flow in translation through transatlantic flights, communicating what is left of them and trying to fit them together.

He doesn’t hate flying, but he hates waiting, gets fidgety and too in his head, so she speaks through the hand that always finds its way to his, through the fingers that always weave through hers. What they can’t say in the many languages that they know, they say with the way that she jumps in front of bullets for him and the way that he tackles her shooters.

For sure, there is love there – undefinable, undemanding, shapeless in its form. Wherever they are, it exists, whether together or apart and for the first time in her long relationship with him, Tessa is starting to realize that maybe she’s not whole, but this love is.

“You’re here with me,” he says, eyes carefully blank and looking ahead. He has his feet up on the table with the nonchalance of a man who is unmarred by tragedy. It’s all a façade, Tessa knows that too well.

It’s also not an answer, not anything that’s at all related to what she said but she knows what it means. Somewhere between translations and transatlantic flights, he meant _you can feel unwhole with me_. It’s a small comfort that with all the codes that they’ve mastered for the various jobs that they took on, it’s this code that is just theirs.

The beer is cold in her hand and wet under her grip and he’s laying back on the couch with a heavy sigh. A semblance of their lives before all of this happened, but with the undertones of a tragedy waiting for its climax.

So she leans over, takes his beer out of his hand and straddles him. His head comes up in surprise but his hazel eyes are muted in their emotions. She hates this, hates that she used to see crinkles at the corners, hates that he used to grip her waist with a possessiveness that she used to revel in – now seems like a bad dream that she can’t shake.

Her hands come up to his face, fingers tracing the corners of his eyes, begging for that easy smile. But he just leans into her touch with a slow blink, gaze piercing into hers.

It’s been a long while since they’d done this.

Would he taste like the ashes that the destruction had left in its wake?

She kisses him, dry. Her hands clutch at his hair and he lets out this pained little moan into her mouth that just – she just – she wants this to end. She wants him. She wants to run and never look back. She wants to take care of him and pull him out of this. She wants to be alone.

She wants to never be alone anymore, but it feels like too much to ask with everything that’s happened and with everyone that they’d lost.

His tongue dips into her mouth with hesitation like he’s never tasted her like this before – broken and lost.

Soon, there’s a bed. Soon, their clothes are on the floor. Soon, he’s pinning her hands above her head and pounding into her – soon, he’s slowing down, eyes closed against the strong beating of his heart, tears falling down onto her cheeks.

Soon, he’s collapsing into her, close enough that they share their breaths in the space that holds this fragile love between them.

She takes his face in her hands. “Scott, look at me.”

He opens his eyes.

Tessa gives him a small smile. “You’re here with me,” she says, and he nods.

He starts making love to her, slow, unsure, but steady and warm.

She wasn’t asking for anything and this is already too much.

*

It was always something _inevitable_.

Their jobs, their loose ends, the world ending. Sometimes, it’s as simple as _I don’t love you that way_ , but they always know they’re lying.

This time though, that “something inevitable” is hidden under rubble and dust as New York’s skyline shimmers through the glass walls of the living room.

Scott has been uncharacteristically jumpy and distracted the past few days as they flew from country to country, on call as the only remaining members of the Avengers that can respond as quickly.

It’s not the planes anymore. He would be handing her a cup of coffee in Bangkok, smiling at the bright afternoon sun. A second later, his eyes are dark and stormy and his whole body is frozen. A thousand pictures pass behind his gaze too fast for Tessa to comprehend and then he’s sitting in front of her with a smile that can disguise as real to anyone. But not to her.

So she asks, one night in Manila.

The stakeout is in a small 24-hour diner at a street corner of a sleepy town and she’s trying not to shiver at the cool night breeze in her tank. Scott is smirking at her from across the green plastic table because he brought a jacket and she didn’t. He would offer, she knows that, but she would glare, and he knows that.

She asks and she gets the usual answer.

“The Beirut job could have gone a lot differently if you were a little more distracted,” she says behind the rim of her cheap coffee.

“I’m sorry,” he replies, almost sounding like he really does mean it.

It was supposed to be a simple extraction job but somewhere between running towards the exit and making a break for it outside and into their waiting vehicle, he looks back at their shooters and fires a round of explosive arrows. And while that’s usually how a Wednesday night goes for them, he stops by a staircase and decides to take out each and every one of the seemingly endless mafia cronies trying to catch them.

“You should have just left them.”

“You should have just run.”

“And leave you?” The trembling starts but this time, she feels it in her fingertips. “We got the guy, we were just escaping. How is you killing off all their hundred-strong members going to help?”

“They could have gotten to you, I was just being careful.” His voice could not be more _dead_.

“No, you were being careless, Scott, and you know that.”

He frowns and looks down. “I didn’t wanna risk it.”

“Risk what?”

There’s a goat bleating from somewhere in the distance, and then a soft howl. She bristles at the breeze and the unsettling shade of hazel that his eyes have taken on.

“The inevitable,” he replies.

Two days later, he disappears. She doesn’t find him until it’s five years since the snap and there might be an answer in the works.

Still, when she takes his hand in the rain in Tokyo and their final conversation rises from the dust and rubbles of her memories, she thinks _all is forgiven, it’s Scott, all is forgiven._ He was just afraid and hurting. He was scared of losing her.

He never answered but she didn’t have to ask.

“We’ll get them all back,” she promises, hair clinging to her cheeks with rainwater. This time, she remembers to bring her peacoat. “All of them. And we will make sure that it will never happen again.”

He nods and comes home.

//

Scott watches different colored lights passing by his view and thinks, “This is a long way from Budapest”, aloud to Tessa, sitting beside him. She shoots him a smile so wide that for a second, he forgets all his training and thinks everything will be alright.

Underneath all that, he finds forgiveness and comfort for all the things he apologized for. And for all the things he never talks about. When it’s Tessa, there’s always forgiveness for a sinner like him. So readily given that sometimes he wants it to just stop. A killer like him, and all that he’s done for the past five years, doesn’t deserve such.

Still, she smiles and he remembers why he’s here.

Vormir is a wasteland and the red floating skeleton is a nightmare. The rules are bullshit and he’s thinking of pointing something sharp at the red floating dude for the stone, but then Tessa’s launching herself towards the cliff and he’s scrambling to reach for her –

He didn’t think he would be fighting her this way, hanging off the deep edge with only his rope and the hand that’s holding tightly around her wrist.

He knew something dangerous clicked in her eyes when she figured out the consequence, the trade-off necessary, he just _knew_ , and he still couldn’t escape the inevitable.

Scott starts begging for her to hang on, he starts praying, wishing for time to slow, for his hand to have more strength. He starts crying out in pain and in prayer –

“Please, Tess.”

But she’s looking up at him with a sad smile on her lips and the _inevitable_ in her voice. “It’s okay. You can let go.”

He doesn’t want to. He would give his life, he would give his everything, his own soul for her to stop falling to her death. For the first time in forever, he wishes he had something – a superpower, an ability to save Tessa, he wishes he had taken all that time he spent worrying about the inevitable and put it all into making sure that she knew she was not alone.

He’s an idiot.

He should be dead.

That thought hits right as he feels the small dagger by his hip, and with one quick swipe, the rope snaps and he falls.

*

His last thought was “it’s not towards death, it’s towards her” and the next was “fuck, I’m not dead”.

When he opens his eyes, it’s to dark skies and a hand wrapped around his. For a second, he thinks he’s dead, now, for real. But he feels the hand twitch in his grip. The water around them is freezing cold and shallow, and he fears that he could sleep in it and drown.

He looks to find Tessa staring at the same sky with wide eyes.

“I feel like I just died.”

Scott laughs because of course he does.

She turns her head and pierces him with a gaze so steady it burns through his resolve right away, even without words. She asks “Did you follow after me?”

He finds no reason to lie. “Yes.”

“We didn’t get the stone, then.”

_“Half a soul.”_

The red floating skeleton hovers above the water like a scary Jesus and if Scott isn’t so tired and beaten, he would have shot him with an arrow.

 _“I demanded one in exchange for the stone, and not any more than that.”_ Red Floating Skeleton levitates towards them and they sit up, ready to fight. _“There are so few things in this world that defy the laws of the universe. For that feat, you get to go home alive.”_

The skies change into brighter clouds but Scott’s heart is still beating so loud.

 _“You each get half a soul,”_ the creature repeats and then vanishes.

Leaving Tessa and Scott, and the stone between their clasped hands.

**Author's Note:**

> for úna, for tolerating my bursts of emotions  
> for tara, love you


End file.
